As leaders of the world’s largest economies prepare to attend the upcoming G20 meeting in Hangzhou, China, 130 investors with over USD 13 trillion in assets under management have written to the G20 Heads of State urging them to ratify the Paris Climate Change Agreement this year.

The investors, from a coalition of six organizations, have also called on G20 nations to double global investment in clean energy, tighten up climate disclosure mandates, develop carbon pricing and phase out fossil fuel subsidies.

The letter starts by saying:

"The Paris Agreement on climate change provides a clear signal to investors that the transition to the low-carbon, clean energy economy is inevitable and already underway.

Governments have a responsibility to work with the private sector to ensure that this transition happens fast enough to catalyse the significant investment required to achieve the Paris Agreement’s  goals including:

• Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, and

• Achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions (“a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of GHGs”) in the second half of the century."

The six organisations co-sponsoring the letter are: IIGCC - Europe’s Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change; Ceres/INCR - the North American Investor Network on Climate Risk; IGCC –the Australia/New Zealand Investor Group on Climate Change; AIGCC – the Asia Investor Group on Climate Change; CDP and PRI.

See the full letter to G20 governments and the full media release by the coalition of investors here